optical experiments and anémic cinéma

In January 1920, Duchamp made (again) an optical experiment with the assistance of Man Ray. Making us of the fact that the eye retains an image for a fraction of a second after it diappeared, he built a motorized machine, 'Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics)'. Segments of a circle were painted on five glass plates mounted on an electrically operated metal axis. Rubber strips connected the axis to the motor. The experiment was no success.

Three years later, Duchamp tried this experiment again, now using a turntable of a record player. He made a series of 'Disks Bearing Spirals' (1923) mounted on cardboard. This anticipated the spiral theme that would later appear in 'Rotary Demisphere' (Precision Optics, 1925) and in the film 'Anémic Cinéma' (1925-1926). The revolving disks produced a three-dimensional effect.

The disks in 'Disks Bearing Spirals' (1923) were preliminary studies for Duchamp's (second) attempt to produce a three-dimensional film. This time he just filmed rotating disks, alternating ten 'Optical Disks', based on the earlier 'Disks Bearing Spirals'. Nine of these disks were inscribed by puns, white letters pasted on black cardboard disks.

Bart Testa: "Anemic Cinema alternates shots of moving spirals and shots of texts mounted on disks in slight relief. The texts, which we read from the outside inwards, involve complex word play that may, on certain if always instable readings, suggest to us a set of erotic scenarios. On one, let's call it a material level, Duchamp's film lives up to its name: it minimizes the element of silent films: words, then images. Duchamp sharply bifurcates the film viewing activity into two: reading words on a screen and viewing images, moving spirals, whose motion produces the play of depth and flatness that is a given of cinematic illusion. On another, let's call it a phenomenal level, the combined reading and viewing of silent films conventionally give rise to a third activity: our imaginative conjuration of a domain with all the space and furniture of a world. It is what film semioticians term diegesis. Anemic Cinema exposes, by its reduction, this third and paradoxically maximizing activity: our imaginary production of diegesis, which can still happen in Anemic Cinema. And the film does this, amazingly enough, by dismissing mimesis.

The language of Anemic Cinema, provided we catch on to it, provokes us to conjure the space of a diegetic world that it refuses to show. What it does show, between its spiraling puns, is the pulsation of those intervening spiraling abstract forms. To return, for a second, to 'Un chien Andalou', it is a film of superabundant mimesis, showing one mad event after another. It is also a film that notoriously renders constructing a coherent diegesis, in the sense of denotative narration, very unlikely. Both films engender a striking disturbance of the lexical function of text-image relations that, by the 1920s, seemed so secure."

TEXT CREDITS
Bart Testa, Screen Words : Early Film and Avant-Garde Film in the House of the Word (2002).